Ariel Bintang’s pieces can be understood as abstractions of figurative landscapes. The color choices, of vivid greens, blues, and oranges, don’t happen much in the real world, and when they do, not in the way that Bintang uses them. But Bintang also deftly outlines recognizable features into the pieces — buildings, cliffs, rocks, islands, clouds — that show them as landscapes, reduced to their essentials and manipulated. It makes sense, as Bintang, like fellow artists Uzayr Agha and Ethnie Xu, is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. In “Mosaic,” the show running now through Aug. 25 at City Gallery, the three artists transfer their eyes for the landscape and the built environment around them to two-dimensional canvases.
Uzayr Agha’s mixed-media pieces lean heavy into geometric shapes and vibrant color, resulting in pieces that reflect the sense of a planned urban environment: a grid of streets, the elements of a building, the frame of a door, the silhouette of a skyscraper. But the artist has also deconstructed these elements with a whimsical flair; unlike Bintang, Agha’s work moves fully into abstraction. If the pieces are of buildings, it’s easy also to imagine them in buildings; perhaps they would be at their most effective in architecture spaces that echo their elements in key ways, bringing out just how far Agha has pushed the shapes deployed in the art.
City Gallery’s website explains that the show is a collaboration with artists from outside the gallery’s member roster: “ ‘Mosaic’ came about as after creative conversations between artist and architect Ethnie Xu, gallery members Roberta Friedman and Sue Rollins, and NXTHVN’s Student Program Manager Jay Kemp. The result is an exhibit that features a range of painting, mixed media, collage, and ink and print work.” The show’s opening reception on Aug. 10 also featured a visit from the cARTie program’s Legacy Mobile Exhibition, which has appeared at various locations in New Haven throughout the summer, including NXTHVN.
Where Bintang mixes figures and abstraction, and Agha tilts in favor of the abstract, Xu creates pieces that look almost like panels from a carefully drawn graphic novel. The depictions of cityscapes call attention to enough detail to suggest we’re seeing part of a narrative, a glimpse into an ongoing story, even if there are no people in the images.
The approach comes to a head in a piece that ties together a series of disparate places into an array of panels. Xu makes sure that we see connections from panel to panel, making lines meet up. But the scenes themselves don’t obviously connect. Are they all in the same city, blocks apart? Are they halfway around the world from one another? A specific meaning is hard to construct. The effect is somewhat like being in a busy, unfamiliar city for the first time in real life. The surface-level chaos always hits you first. Once you gain your balance, there’s often the feeling that perhaps there’s a plan pulsing beneath the surface — even if you may never know what it is.
“Mosaic” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Aug. 25. Visit the gallery’s website for details.